Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O’Neill read law at Girton College, Cambridge, preferring it over English because "literature was too precious" and he wanted it to remain a hobby. O'Neill started off his literary career in poetry but had turned away from it by the age of 24. After being called to the English Bar in 1987, he spent a year writing his first novel. O'Neill then entered full-time practice as a barrister in London, principally in the field of business law.
A barrister by profession, Joseph O’Neill has written several well-received novels. The first. This Is the Life, revolves around a hapless hero, James Jones, who idolizes renowned international lawyer Michael Donovan. After finishing law school, Jones finds work in Donovan’s chambers for six months, but, to his disappointment, ultimately fails to secure a permanent position. Jones begins work at a small firm, and years later Donovan calls upon Jones to act for him in a divorce case. Jones comes to terms with his own identity during his torture-wracked courtroom preparations.
Critics noted that O'Neill's writing had grown more cynical with his next novel, The Breezes, published in 1995. As in This Is the Life, O'Neill's second work depicts down-on-their-luck characters who, in this case, are a family who "seem oblivious to the blows which life continually and indiscriminately deals them." O'Neill seems to be questioning how people even get out of bed when life offers so much misfortune. Told through the perspective of the son, John Breeze, the story details the various stumbling blocks that his family encounters. His mother is killed by a lightning bolt, his father is a bumbling soccer referee and a magnet for mishaps, his sister dates a loser, and even his dog Trusty runs away. O'Neill's captivating and unique writing style caught the eye of several critics.
O'Neill turned to nonfiction for his third book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Born in Cork, Ireland, the author was always more or less aware of his mixed Irish and Turkish ancestry. When he was eleven, however, he learned that both his grandfathers had spent time in prison during World War II. His family was always relatively close-mouthed about the circumstances of each incarceration, so O'Neill decided to research the matter for himself. He published his findings in Blood-Dark Track, which reveals that his Irish grandfather was a member of the IRA terrorist organization and that his Turkish grandfather may well have been the Axis spy the British imprisoned him for being. His fourth novel The Dog, published in 2014, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

book

Blood-Dark Track

(Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers - one Turkish, one Irish - ...)

Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers - one Turkish, one Irish - were both imprisoned for suspected subversion during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA. O'Neill's other grandfather, a debonair hotelier from the tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was interned by the British in Palestine on suspicion of being an Axis spy. With intellect, compassion, and grace, O'Neill sets the stories of these individuals against the history of the last century's most inhuman events.

Netherland

(Hans van den Broek stumbles upon the vibrant New York sub...)

Hans van den Broek stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. As the two men share their vastly different experiences of contemporary immigrant life in America, an unforgettable portrait emerges of an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.

The Dog

(Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, ou...)

Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the “family officer” of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the “doghouse,” a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped - even if he’s just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind’s moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O’Neill’s hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.

Good Trouble

(A masterly collection of eleven stories about the way we ...)

A masterly collection of eleven stories about the way we live now from the best-selling author of Netherland. From bourgeois facial-hair trends to parental sleep deprivation, Joseph O’Neill closely observes the mores of his characters, whose vacillations and second thoughts expose the mysterious pettiness, underlying violence, and, sometimes, surprising beauty of ordi­nary life in the early twenty-first century. A lonely wedding guest talks to a goose; two poets struggle over whether to participate in a “pardon Edward Snowden” verse petition; a cowardly husband lets his wife face a possible intruder in their home; a potential co-op renter in New York City can’t find anyone to give him a character reference. On the surface, these men and women may be in only mild trouble, but in these perfectly made, fiercely modern stories O’Neill reminds us of the real, secretly political consequences of our internal monologues. No writer is more incisive about the strange world we live in now; the laugh-out-loud vulnerability of his people is also fodder for tears.

video

The Breezes

(Fourteen years ago Mary Breeze was killed by lightning - ...)

Fourteen years ago Mary Breeze was killed by lightning - it should. have been all the bad luck that the Breeze family were due but. as John Breeze is about to find out. this couldnt be further from the truth 'The Breezes' is John Breezes account of his familys most hellish fortnight -. when insurance policies. security systems and lucky underpants are pitted against redundancy. burglary and relegation - and lose. John (a failing chair-maker) and his father (railway manager and rubbish football referee) are only feebly equipped with shaky religious notions. management maxims and cynical postures as they try to come to terms with the absurd unfairness of lightning striking twice.

People Also Searched For

Joseph O'Neill is an Irish author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track.

Background

Ethnicity:
Joseph O'Neills of half-Irish and half-Turkish ancestry.

Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, on February 23, 1964, to Kevin (a construction manager) and Caroline (a teacher; maiden name, Dakad). O'Neill's parents moved around much in O'Neill's youth: O'Neill spent time in Mozambique as a toddler and in Turkey until the age of four, and he also lived in Iran. From the age of six, O'Neill lived in the Netherlands. Since 1998 he has lived in New York City.

Education

Joseph O'Neill attended the Lycee Francais de La Haye and the British School in the Netherlands. He later studied at Girton College, Cambridge and became a bachelor in 1985. O'Neill attended the Inns of Court School of Law from 1986 to 1987.

Career

Joseph O’Neill read law at Girton College, Cambridge, preferring it over English because "literature was too precious" and he wanted it to remain a hobby. O'Neill started off his literary career in poetry but had turned away from it by the age of 24. After being called to the English Bar in 1987, he spent a year writing his first novel. O'Neill then entered full-time practice as a barrister in London, principally in the field of business law.

A barrister by profession, Joseph O’Neill has written several well-received novels. The first. This Is the Life, revolves around a hapless hero, James Jones, who idolizes renowned international lawyer Michael Donovan. After finishing law school, Jones finds work in Donovan’s chambers for six months, but, to his disappointment, ultimately fails to secure a permanent position. Jones begins work at a small firm, and years later Donovan calls upon Jones to act for him in a divorce case. Jones comes to terms with his own identity during his torture-wracked courtroom preparations.

Critics noted that O'Neill's writing had grown more cynical with his next novel, The Breezes, published in 1995. As in This Is the Life, O'Neill's second work depicts down-on-their-luck characters who, in this case, are a family who "seem oblivious to the blows which life continually and indiscriminately deals them." O'Neill seems to be questioning how people even get out of bed when life offers so much misfortune. Told through the perspective of the son, John Breeze, the story details the various stumbling blocks that his family encounters. His mother is killed by a lightning bolt, his father is a bumbling soccer referee and a magnet for mishaps, his sister dates a loser, and even his dog Trusty runs away. O'Neill's captivating and unique writing style caught the eye of several critics.

O'Neill turned to nonfiction for his third book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Born in Cork, Ireland, the author was always more or less aware of his mixed Irish and Turkish ancestry. When he was eleven, however, he learned that both his grandfathers had spent time in prison during World War II. His family was always relatively close-mouthed about the circumstances of each incarceration, so O'Neill decided to research the matter for himself. He published his findings in Blood-Dark Track, which reveals that his Irish grandfather was a member of the IRA terrorist organization and that his Turkish grandfather may well have been the Axis spy the British imprisoned him for being. His fourth novel The Dog, published in 2014, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Achievements

O'Neill's book Netherland was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was called "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell." It was also included in the New York Times list of the 10 Best Books of 2008. Blood-Dark Track: A Family History was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a book of the year for the Economist and the Irish Times.

video

Personality

O'Neill speaks English, French, and Dutch. He played club cricket in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and has played for many years at the Staten Island Cricket Club, much like his Netherland protagonist Hans. His love of cricket continues and he is an active player (as of 2015).

In an interview with The Paris Review in 2014 O'Neill said, explaining his interest in writing about Dubai in The Dog, "I’ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don’t really belong to a particular place, and so I have little option but to seek out dramatic situations that I might have a chance of understanding."